The more officials of the Obama administration say about prospects for the HealthCare.gov website, the less they can be believed.

As The Associated Press noted this week:

• At an Oct. 30 congressional hearing, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, said there would be an "optimally functioning website" by the end of November.

• On Nov. 5, Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, testified that by the end of November, the website would be "fully functioning."

There's no misunderstanding the meaning of their assurances: Disastrous problems with online enrollment through the federal health insurance exchange would be fixed by Nov. 30.

Now they are backpedaling again.

Sebelius said this week, "The 30th of November is not a magic go, no-go date. It is a work of constant improvement."

Translation: Forget what we said earlier. We still have major problems. Then again, the site was working so poorly on launch day, there was nowhere to go but up ("constant improvement").

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported this week that Sebelius, Tavenner and White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park attended a briefing April 4 at which an independent outside consultant predicted many of the problems that surfaced during and after the launch. McKinsey & Co. held three additional briefings between March 28 and April 8 — a full six months before the launch date — including one attended by White House officials.

In these briefings, the consulting company said that the project needed an overall coordinator, which was never done. It said that benchmarks for the website's success should be established in April; this was not done until weeks after the Oct. 1 rollout. It warned that constant design changes wouldn't leave much time to test the system before it went live, and that major fixes would be difficult to make once the site was operating.

The scale of the incompetence, from Sebelius on down, that allowed HealthCare.gov to crash and burn remains as stunning as the answer to this question remains elusive: Why are heads not rolling?